Help Us Find the Worst Road in America

The Popular Mechanics editors are trying to find—and test-drive—the worst road in the USA. So if you know of a truly appalling stretch of shoddy asphalt in your neck of the woods, take a few photos and send them to us at pmwebmaster@hearst.com. If your lousy road makes the final cut, PM will drive it in a test car equipped with sophisticated data-logging equipment to determine which road is really the worst in America.

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Apr 19, 2011

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At one time or another, everybody thinks they've driven over the worst road this country has to offer. But we'd like to find and objectively measure the absolute worst road in America. Popular Mechanics has teamed up with National Instruments, a manufacturer of industrial test and measurement technology, to create a customized data logger with a multiaxis accelerometer. We're going to bolt this thing to a test car, then drive over the most cracked, crumbling, pothole-ridden, frost-heaved stretches of highway in the nation.

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But we need your help. We're calling on all readers to submit their worst local road to us via email at pmwebmaster@hearst.com. All submissions must include your name and email contact info, plus several photos or video showing just how bad your road is, location info (GPS coordinates or mile-marker designations for the worst 1-mile stretch) and a short description of the road's condition. All nominated roads must be state-level or above (no private roads), paved (well, there must have at least been an attempt to pave it at some point), within U.S. borders (sorry, Canada) and neglected for the last several months (no attempts to fix the damage). To be clear, we're not looking for roads that have been wrecked by some sort of natural disaster; we're searching for roads that have fallen into disrepair through prolonged governmental neglect.

Once we've reached a critical mass of submissions, we'll narrow the field down to the top five, then hit the road with our diagnostic equipment and a bunch of spare rims to drive these horrifying routes for ourselves. Then we'll work with National Instruments' engineers to crunch the data and publish our results in a future issue of PM. There's no official prize, unless you count the satisfaction of holding your state officials responsible for shoddy maintenance. So get out there and take some pictures, then send us your county's most embarrassing stretch of asphalt.